Sell stuff. Get people to sell their stuff on your site and take a small bite of the sale price. Don't rely on ads and seo - too competitive. Then, go out and pound the pavement and get people to sign up to sell stuff. Would be good if you get a sales guy in your startup team.
It gets quite a bit of traffic, mostly from search, but it has proven very hard to monetize. Tried adsense, but my content was too risque for them. Was using an ad network called clicksor for a while, but their ads are very intrusive and didn't perform well enough to justify the bad user experience. I even tried the adult friend finder affiliate program for my "unsafe" content, but it performed absolutely horribly.
Would love to hear more ideas from the HN crowd. How does one go about finding private advertisers without a salesforce?
Dude your problem is not ad networks, rather the monetizing strategy. Traffic is huge, but comes from 600 some search terms / phrases (very, very defragmented). I’d group all search term based on similarity. Find yourself some kick ass affiliate offers to go along with each visitor group. Serve the ads accordingly, instead of relying on Google welfare. Based on what I’ve tried and seen, you should be able to get $20/25 CPM at minimum.
The only way I've made money on any site is by selling something. Ads are great, but I can never get them to cover anything but basic operating costs, and even then they will barely cover the costs to keep a server running.
Depending on how the site is set up, you can either sell a product or a service. The problem with that is largely that you have to have something people are willing to pay for. I know quite a few blog-type sites have had success with a model along the lines of Current month free, Archives require payment.
I wrote this last week for another 'Ask HN' thread regarding starting a successful blog. Thought it would also apply here -
"Generating revenue - whole books can be written on this subject (and they have been). But it can broadly be broken down into five categories -
1. Advertisements - the magic word here is CPM (read up on that). The higher the CPM, higher the payout for you. A word of advice in this matter - adsense is complete horseshit when it comes to CPM. Don't buy into the hype, it's absolutely pathetic. Same goes for Adbrite, Chitika etc. The real money is in PRIVATE ads. Take a look at the prominent blogs - like techcrunch.com for example - do you see any adsense or other types of nonsense on their blogs? It's mainly used as a placeholder in case any private ad spots weren't bought by advertisers. NEVER rely on adsense for your primary ad revenue. Having said that, you won't have private advertisers till you have good traffic, so it's ok to start with adsense. But as soon as traffic spikes up, dump adsense like it's the plague.
2. Affiliate - this is a bit trickier than ads being that it's not completely straightforward. The basic idea is that you link to products on your site and if you readers follow your links to buy those products, you get a cut of the sale. Amazon is a good start, but they're not the best. The key is finding a good affiliate that fits YOUR blog audience the best. The next step would be to beef up on your affiliate marketing skills. Start reading affiliate marketing blogs like shoemoney.com for this.
3. Merchandising - you can sell stuff on your blog. This can be as complicated as actually creating your own product or as simple as setting up a cafe press store and selling related merchandise (INSANELY easy! Just go to cafepress.com and set up a store for your blog, and they will handle the rest, by taking a commission of your sales.)
4. Job Board - a specific section on your blog where ppl can post or look for jobs. Charge based on traffic. You can either set up your own job board from scratch (check out the problogger job boards on the bottom right of problogger.com) or do some research on alternatives - http://www.blogtrepreneur.com/2008/04/29/make-money-with-you... (Job-A-Matic has a good premise). Read up on this.
5. Donations - Bloggers like Steve Pavlina and Leo Babauta use this method and it works out great for them. But it's not for everyone. Your audience has to LOVE you, or at least really appreciate you, for this."
There are also intangiable (non-physical) products you can sell.
For example, my product is a web based RPG. We use a points system, where users can purchase Brownie Points in various increments. Then they can redeem those points for various products (all of which web-site only features.)
It's an alternative to subscriptions (like Lighthouse). Where your users pay a monthly or yearly fee.
We're running a freemium model. Users get to view ads or they can pay to remove them and get some other features. The free part gets a lot of people into the game (as a figure of speech, but also literally) and some buy a VIP account.
I understand downvoting the useless and malicious, but this was a /joke,/ people. 0 is fine if you don't want it in the discussion; Negative numbers are just gratuitous.
